htning speed in the firmament beside their spinning
plane! The winds stilled; the green globe changed abruptly to a
landscape of green land and sea toward which the plane was falling!
Norman was fighting the controls--land and sea were gyrating up to
them with dizzy speed--crash!

With that cracking crash the plane was motionless. Sunlight poured
through its windows, and great green growths were all around it.
Hackett, despite Norman's warning cry, forced the door open and was
bursting outside, Norman after him. They staggered and fell, with
curious lightness and slowness, on the ground outside, then clutched
the plane for support and gazed stupefiedly around them.

The plane had crashed down into a thicket of giant green reeds that
rose a yard over their heads, its pancake landing having apparently
not damaged it. The ground beneath their feet was soft and soggy, the
air warm and balmy, and the giant reeds hid all the surrounding
landscape from view.

In the sky the sun burned near one horizon with unusual brilliance.
But it was dwarfed, in size, by the huge gray circle that filled half
the heavens overhead. A giant gray sphere it was, screened here and
there by floating white mists and clouds, that had yet plain on it
the outlines of dark continents and gleaming seas. A quaking
realization held the two as they stared up at it.

* * * * *

"Earth!" Norman was babbling. "It's Earth, Hackett--above us; my God,
I can't believe even yet that we've done it!"

"Then we're on--the satellite--the second satellite!--" Hackett fought
for reality. "Those winds that caught us--"

"They were the atmosphere of this world, of the second satellite! They
caught us and carried us on inside this smaller world's atmosphere,
Hackett. We're moving with it around Earth at terrific speed now!"

"The second satellite, and we on it!" Hackett whispered,
incredulously. "But these reeds--it can't all be like this--"

They stepped together away from the plane. The effort sent each of
them sailing upward in a great, slow leap, to float down more than a
score of feet from the plane. But unheeding in their eagerness this
strange effect of the satellite's lesser gravitational power, they
moved on, each step a giant, clumsy leap. Four such steps took them
out of the towering reeds onto clear ground.

It was a gentle, grassy slope they were on, stretching away along a
gray-green sea that extended out to the asto